Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • Upsetting the French

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  • Super good at women’s track & field

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    And the Democrats wonder why they lost.

  • The true story cannot be told often enough

    Howard Jacobson at the JC on remembering Auschwitz:

    I don’t expect everybody to agree that the only real subject of art since 1945 has been the genocide – I mean the actual genocide of the Jews, not the politically manufactured genocides of which Jews are now routinely accused – and the only testing philosophical question, “How did that ever happen?” But if we thought we’d had enough – and I often told myself I had – the return of Jew-hate to the streets and campuses of Western cities is a harsh reminder that we need to restart the conversation. Not from wherever it was we left off, but from the beginning. That repeated mantra – “never again” – appears a fatuous hope in the face of the widespread callous ignorance as to what it was the first time round.

    It has been said often enough that Holocaust denial takes many forms, from the brute mathematics of those who jotted down the dimensions of Auschwitz to prove that it was no bigger than Butlin’s, and probably more fun, to historians who claim to have found evidence that Jews had done it to themselves to justify invading Palestine. Of all forms of denialism, the worst minimises the slaughter by arguing that Jews were always just Nazis in waiting anyway, thereby forfeiting in advance the world’s pity, first by showing none themselves, and then by claiming what we might call “Shoah exemption”.

    I have yet to meet a Jew in real life – as opposed to on a panel or at a literary festival – who believes that what was done to his grandparents in Bergen-Belsen gives him the right to murder children in Gaza, but this passes as psychology in some quarters, especially where Jews of a certain over-educated sort get together and squirm whenever Jews without degrees and from the wrong side of the tracks make a dog’s dinner of defending Israel. […]

    One way or another, the lesson of the last 15 months is that the greatest calamity to have befallen a people – to have befallen the Jews, anyway – remains unknown or disbelieved, no matter how often we recount it or how many schlock Holocaust novels people read. The Chartered Accountant of Auschwitz might while away a tedious hour, but it hasn’t brought knowledge or enlightenment.

    The true story cannot be told often enough – not only as history of terrible events we are duty bound to commemorate, but as an honest reckoning with the aftermath. And we Jews have to stop being apologetic about repeating it.

  • Fighting against capitalist cultural infiltration

    From the Daily NK:

    North Korea’s University of Technology of Songrim conducted a campus-wide review last month of violations against the country’s anti-reactionary thought law, Daily NK has learned.

    “Late last month, all students and staff were summoned to the university’s assembly hall,” a source in North Hwanghae province told Daily NK recently. “The review examined every ‘anti-socialist and non-socialist’ incident that occurred on campus during the past year.”

    Officials from the city’s unified command on non-socialist behavior attended the session, creating a tense atmosphere as they detailed 2024’s violations and subsequent punishments.

    Among the cases highlighted was a professor caught possessing illegal USBs and SD cards. Despite containing few files and the professor claiming mere curiosity, the offense resulted in dismissal and six months of forced labor – officials emphasized that merely possessing such materials constituted a serious crime against the regime.

    Another case involved a third-year metallurgy student who sang a foreign love song during a phone call with his girlfriend, which officials labeled a “serious example of capitalist cultural infiltration.” The student faced a Socialist Patriotic Youth League criticism session and received four months of forced labor before being allowed to resume studies. His classmates who “failed to take his crime seriously” were punished with a month of campus cleaning and guard duty.

    “Following the unified command’s offer of leniency for voluntary confessions, several students came forward with prepared statements about past infractions,” the source said. “Despite following pre-written scripts, they received lighter treatment for coming forward voluntarily. Instead of criminal punishment, officials ordered self-criticism letters and ideological training sessions to ‘rearm themselves with revolutionary ideology.'”

    The officials concluded by warning that reactionary thought and culture represented “a grave threat that could spark a national crisis” and constituted “an enemy trick to erode youth ideology and decay the revolution’s future.” They announced plans to “strengthen the system for self-reporting, complaints, and informing on others, while intensifying ideological inspections of professors and students.”

    How different from our own freedom-loving universities! 

  • More oxygen in the air

    This from Andrew Sullivan (via) reinforces the point made by Justin Webb yesterday about the sense of exhilaration in the US now after the moribund Biden years, and making America normal again. Yes, it's Trump…but:

    To say I have conflicted feelings after a week or so of Trump’s return to power would be an understatement. Some of his early decisions remind me why I couldn’t vote for him. His decision to pardon even those among the J6 mob who assaulted cops jibes with his own instinctual love of vigilante justice against anyone in his way. That’s why his egregious withdrawal of security detail from John Bolton and Mike Pompeo is so instructive. Trump is no longer fond of these men, so he has all but invited a foreign hostile government to murder them. His embrace of anti-police vigilanteism at home is matched by his removal of sanctions on the violent settlers in the West Bank this week. He’s a thug who loves thugs.

    But for all this, a large part of me is exhilarated by this first week. Yes, exhilarated. Liberated even. I wasn’t quite expecting this, but I can’t deny it. I suddenly feel more oxygen in the air as the woke authoritarianism of the last four years begins finally to lift. And let me put the core reason for this exhilaration as simply as I can. On the central questions of immigration and identity politics, what Trump is proposing is simply a return to common sense — a reflection of the sane views of the vast majority of Americans, who support secure borders and oppose unfairness in sports and medical experiments on children. My conservative soul is glad.

  • Holocaust Memorial Day

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  • First person in Ireland to marry themself

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  • More likely that the Covid-19 pandemic originated from a lab leak

    At the time of the Covid outbreak, Trump blamed China. "The China plague", he called it. This was so shocking that decent-minded people everywhere went out of their way to go easy on China's culpability, and never to mention the lab-leak hypothesis except as the province of wild-eyed conspiracy theorists.

    Now:

    The CIA now believes it is more likely that the Covid-19 pandemic originated from a laboratory leak rather than emerging from nature, a spokesman said.

    The question of the source of the virus that has killed more than seven million people is politically charged and China has repeatedly denied responsibility.

    For years the CIA said it could not definitively say what Covid’s origins were but the spy agency has now shifted that assessment while stressing the finding was “low confidence”.

    “CIA assesses with low confidence that a research-related origin of the Covid-19 pandemic is more likely than a natural origin based on the available body of reporting,” a spokesman said in a statement on Saturday….

    In his first interview since being confirmed by the Senate as the new director of the CIA, John Ratcliffe said one of his first priorities was for the agency to make a public declaration on its assessment of the origins of Covid.

    “That’s a day one thing for me,” he told Breitbart. “I’ve been on record as you know in saying I think our intelligence, our science, and our common sense all really dictate that the origin of Covid was a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

    Also:

    The Trump administration is preparing an executive order that would halt federal funding, at least temporarily, for a risky and controversial kind of research into viruses that makes the pathogens more dangerous or contagious.

    The goal of the order would be to stop scientists with U.S. funding from conducting “gain-of-function” research on viruses that could endanger human health, people familiar with the plans said….

    Some Republicans have blamed the Covid-19 pandemic on gain-of-function research. Defenders say it helps scientists assess the potential of pathogens to infect humans and find ways to combat them.

    President Trump’s nominee to lead the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, has expressed support for a pause on the research.

    Doesn't seem such a bad idea – considering, you know, that it's quite possible that earlier “gain-of-function” research on viruses shut the world down and caused the death of some 7 million people.

  • Engaged and holding on tight

    Interesting from Justin Webb in the Sunday Times, from Washington, on the first few days of hectic action from Trump:

    The point everyone made after the immediate fun was that the contrast with the humourless, semi-moribund end to the Biden years was so extreme as to be psychologically, almost physically, shocking to the nation.

    Violent criminals pardoned, Panama threatened, sex and gender sorted; it carried on long after midnight and, like the Spanish Inquisition, could strike without warning….

    Ah yes, the conventional wisdom went, he was indeed energetic but wait till the hurdles come. Wait till it all gets tricky, with the courts rendering some of the orders void, with the immigration ambition — get rid of all those without proper papers — coming up against the fact that many of them are living decent American lives vital to the economy and to keeping inflation low. Ditto for tariffs, if they are imposed: muscular but self-defeating.

    But this, perhaps, is a misunderstanding of the second age of Trump. The hurdles? Bring them on. And crash into them. Jump some, dump some. Pretend they weren’t there. Swerve round them even if the course is now a new one.

    The phrase of the moment is this: “Attention is the new money in American politics.”

    It is a profound truth. A truth with consequences for America — perhaps for us too — that are only now beginning to take shape. The net worth of the billionaires sitting around Trump at the inauguration caught the attention of many, but the more important point is that they hold the keys to attention itself in the modern world….

    What Trump understands is that the attention does not need to be soft and fuzzy and positive, which was the aim in the old days when attention was a passive thing bought by money. Look at what happened last week. The insults, the coarseness, the firings, alongside the promises to bring world peace and harmony and lead a unified nation. A BBC interviewer pointed out to me that there seemed to be intellectual incoherence in some of Trump’s first week. Ya don’t say! …

    It’s keep-’em-guessing elevated to high political style. In fact more; it is actually substance. It is what Trumpism is.

    But this time you get the sense as well that things might change. To regard it all as a hot mess and nothing more is to miss the effectiveness of Trump. He was consequential in his first term largely because his Supreme Court picks paved the way for the end of Roe v Wade. This time there may well be cultural changes that last, because Trump is pushing at a door which — to the distress of progressive Democrats — seems to be wide open.

    Immigration is top of this category. Already Democrats are beginning a long, painful conversation about whether they want to oppose the deportation of criminals: a deportation bill named after Laken Riley, who was murdered by an illegal immigrant, has already passed both houses of Congress and done so with the backing of Democratic politicians.

    The same is likely to happen with bills mandating promotions in government based on merit rather than skin colour.

    But the biggest of the Trump open doors is on sex and gender. His executive order on the subject was tightly written and clearly focused. He has not (yet) waded into the rights and wrongs of childhood gender transition, but he has expressed very clearly a desire to see trans women out of female sport and out of female prisons. Both are, according to opinion polls, popular policies. Do the Democrats want to fight to keep biological males in prisons with women?

    To judge from the Dems' reaction so far, the answer is, yes. It's the hill they're choosing to die on.

    The problem — whisper it — is that for many Americans, including a fair swathe of Democratic party voters, their party has become the extremists.

    Polls taken during Trump’s first week suggest some enthusiasm for the new world. A CBS poll finds nearly a quarter of Kamala Harris voters declaring themselves optimistic about the next four years. To this cross-party group, Trump is not making America great again. He is making it normal again.

    They don’t want to buy Greenland, according to CBS. But the threat has their attention. At the start of the wild ride ahead, they are engaged and holding on tight.

    The comments, it's fair to say, are mixed:

    "What an appalling, fawning and obsequious article."

    "The article is none of these things. It is scarily prescient for those of us who despise Trump, as it recognises that he might actually get some things right."

  • The decline of teen culture

    Hadley Freeman in the Sunday Times today is nostalgic for the Nineties and the golden age of youth magazines:

    Magazines didn’t just tell you what to do — they told you who you were. If you wanted to be known for your musical knowledge, you read The Word, Q, Select and Mojo. If your personality was being cool, you bought Dazed & Confused, i-D and The Face. My favourites were Smash Hits and Empire, confirming my identity as “dorky enthusiast”….

    This is not just nostalgia for a time when people bought magazines, but nostalgia for what they meant. In documentaries about 1990s magazines the journalists invariably say that working on them felt like “being part of a gang”, and that’s how it felt reading them, too. You might look out for your favourite journalists’ names (Tom Hibbert on Smash Hits, never forgotten), but you bought the magazine to be part of its tribe. There were no personal brands back then, no journalists launching their individual Substacks. It was all about the group.

    Searching for an identity is a crucial developmental stage for teenagers. Individuation, therapists call it, meaning the process of becoming an individual. But for young people it is also the opposite of that: becoming an individual separate from their parents, yes, but also finding a group to fit into outside the home. Music and fashion have long served this function, creating subsets like goth, biker and punk, and magazines became part of that in the 1980s and 1990s, with the rise of youth style publications. But what happens when those magazines disappear and parents insist on listening to the same Spotify lists and wearing the same sportswear as their kids?

    The answer, it turned out, was identity politics. Here, like an old-style magazine, was a system that divided people into subsets and told millennials what to think, how to talk, how to present yourself and who you were. It definitely shocked their boomer and Gen X parents, who were astonished their kids were using their ethnicity or religion to define themselves when so many of us had rebelled against that when we were young. Best of all, unlike the old magazines, identity politics gave young people a moral high ground, allowing them to scold their bosses into attending anti-bias workshops and acknowledging National Asexual Day.

    We used to think this was the natural order of things. After WW2, when teens had some money and freedom at last, it was one style after another. Hadley here is looking at the magazines, but – perhaps because I'm older – it's the music that sticks with me…music and clothes and, yes, style. Teds started it off in the Fifties (rock'n'roll), then Mods and Rockers, Hippies, Glam, Punks, Goths, New Age Romantics, Acid House….

    Skinheads were an interesting exception, perhaps. Very much a working class movement, prefiguring punk, they were originally prime National Front material, nasty and thuggish, but then a remarkable thing happened when they discovered Jamaican music – ska, and, later, reggae. It was the sheer joy of the music, I think – music which was genuine, undeniably from the streets, and as far away from middle-class hippies as you could hope for. And the connection with alienated black youth. So we got all that Skinhead Moonstomp and the like, which was built on by Madness and the whole Two-Tone thing. But I digress…

    Now, recently, this perpetual style revolution seems to have stopped. Teens are stuck in their bedrooms, on social media. They're prey to all these social contagions, like gender dysphoria. They (seem to be) miserable, anxious, wondering which particular form of mental problem suits them best.

    Back in the day there was always this thing about corporate culture catching up and taking over. The Man. As soon as a youth movement was established, the suits moved in and soaked it up, and rebellious youth moved on to the next style. That was part of the dynamic. Now the suits – the tech bros – seem to have won. Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg, and TikTok and the rest. With, on the other side, the dictates of DEI and identity politics providing the predetermined categories into which you're allowed to fit.

    Hadley ends with the hope that things get better:

    It will be fascinating to see how young people define themselves in this Trump era. I hope they find a way to do it with more joy than last time around, when Greta Thunberg’s anxious, unhappy face seemed emblematic of her generation. Say what you want about 1990s magazines as a youth movement, but at least they had a sense of humour. And I hope they find something that allows for a collective experience, rather than the atomised loneliness fostered by the internet. Yes, things are bad, but the style magazines emerged in the Thatcher era, so you can create fun in the bleakest of times. It’s your turn now, Gen Z: put your best Face forward.

    Well…we'll see.